Baseball is like a lover that America just can't shake. For years, she has been treating us bad, taking our love for granted. She's gone on strike, locked us out, and cheated on us, too—juicing balls, then players. Yet, every spring we take her back.

She charms everybody in those first, few giddy weeks, thawing even the frozen hearts with seductively whispered dreams of the postseason. All through the lazy summer, she flirts and teases, fickle as the hot wind. She will bore you to tears yammering about her past one minute, and thrill you the next with something you've never seen. She will promise the world, break your heart, and then make you fall in love all over again within a single, sunny afternoon. All the while, she methodically ticks off the days, inexorably winnowing away suitors, bearing her rich fruit briefly in autumn before she inevitably vanishes and leaves us to face the winter alone.

She can be generous and cruel, giving us a dazzling gift like Stephen Strasburg only to take him back a month later. She can be as sublime as Ichiro, extending his own record of 200-hit seasons to an even ten straight. She can be as ridiculous as Manny Ramirez, now peddling his played-out shtick and suspiciously popless bat to American League bottom-feeders. She can be sublime precisely because she is ridiculous, like when an umpire's blown call somehow makes an almost-perfect game more perfect than the two true perfect games which preceded it.

She is no cheap date, but money alone won't win her—just look at the two teams in this year's World Series, which begins tonight in San Francisco. The Giants barely crack the top ten Major League payrolls. The Rangers, a lowly 26th in team salary, spent less than a third of the Yankees this year. But the Bombers are at home—along with the Red Sox, Cubs, Phillies, and the rest of baseball's big spenders.

And she doesn't make life easy, even for her most loyal fans. Take the case of this year's fall classic—how can you decide who to root for? There are plenty of reasons to root for either team. The Giants boast the biggest collection of oddballs and cranks since the "idiot" Red Sox. The team of misfits—in black and orange for the holiday—could only have borne fruit under San Francisco's supremely indulgent care. Where else could "Let's get weird!" be a battle cry? In what other city would a guy nicknamed The Freak not even be the freakiest guy on the team?

The Rangers, for your Oscar consideration, present Josh Hamilton, who went from number one draft pick to alcoholic drug addict to ALCS MVP in the course of 11 years. This dynamic athlete, wearing his scars on his sleeves, offers a real-world story of salvation with the emotional resonance that no dramatized life could hope to match. Perhaps millions of Americans, sadly, will see this World Series from inside the living hell of addiction. Some, if only by accident, will hear Hamilton's story of redemption for the first time. If even one person finds Josh an inspiration, if even one soul can use Hamilton's strength to find new strength of their own and fight back to freedom, the whole world becomes a better place.

Kind of hard to root against him, isn't it?

But human interest can only take a fan so far. Unless you live in Dallas or San Francisco—in which case, incidentally, now might be good time to quit reading—you probably don't give a flying fig about Brian Wilson's beard or the Claws and Antlers. You will probably express mild interest when you hear that a contractual quirk guarantees Bengie Molina—a catcher who was traded from San Francisco to Texas this summer—is a World Series ring no matter who wins. And then flip the channel.

But the real problem with this World Series, especially for casual fans, is not finding someone to root for. The problem is deciding whom to root against. Without arrogant Yankee fans or pretentious Red Sox nation to root against, without any East Coast teams at all in the Fall Classic, just who is the rest of the country supposed to be booing?

Hating the Giants was so easy when Barry Bonds was there. But now? Well, it's still simple. They play in an incredibly provincial city—a city perpetually basking in its own glory, with citizens who not only openly express total contempt the rest of the country, they act genuinely surprised if anyone bothers to disagree. Blinded by fog, numbed by cold, San Franciscans seem simply unable to comprehend that other American cities, places like Chicago and Atlanta for instance, not only have paved roads and indoor plumbing, but even art galleries, restaurants, movie theaters and pretty buildings—just like "The City." This is a people so convinced of their own importance they felt the need to articulate a foreign policy—passing a 2008 ballot initiative declaring it "City policy" to cut off all funding for the Iraqi War. Tax dollars well-spent, San Francisco. Mission accomplished.

They don't oppose America's wars much in Texas. They fight them. They don't burn draft cards and American flags, either. They burn fossil fuels, and they burn them like it's going out of style. Which, not coincidentally, it is. The only city in America where the pickup qualifies as a compact, Dallas, or the Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington Urban Megasprawl if you prefer, is the archetypal Red State town—a perfect Yin to San Francisco's Yang. Hating the place is easy—a city where bad 1980's hairstyles go to die—but don't. A city where cowboys and cowgirls who have never been on a horse love to dish folksy wisdom, Texas-style. These are the folks who'll say stuff like "Never kick a cowchip on a hot day," then smile like they said something profound.

Besides, baseball for Texas is just something to kill time between football seasons. The Rangers could win a dozen pennants and they would still be sent to the back of the sports page by Tony Romo's collarbone. And by the Longhorns, and Aggies, and by whatever high school team is playing well that week. Also, George W. Bush was a part-owner before he was president, still goes to games and the cameras always find him. This isn't a partisan thing. Politicians of any stripe make terrible celebrity cameos. Actors, comics, rappers—anything else works. One look at a divisive figure like George Bush—or Nancy Pelosi—and a World Series watch party can turn to a political debate. That's not what baseball is made for.

But the best reason to root against the Rangers? Their team name. It's an insult to the Greatest of All Men. There is only one Texas Ranger, people. His name is Chuck Norris, and he doesn't need any help to win the World Series. He doesn't have to court the goddess baseball. She courts him.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

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The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

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The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

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Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

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With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.